NEURAL STEM/PROGENITOR CELL TRANSPLANTATION FOR SPINAL CORD INJURY TREATMENT; A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS

—Despite the vast improvements of cell therapy in spinal cord injury treatment, no optimum protocol has been developed for application of neural stem/progenitor cells. In this regard, the present meta-analysis showed that the effi- cacy of the neural stem/progenitor cell (NSPC) transplantation depends mainly on injury model, intervention phase, transplanted cell count, immunosuppressive use, and probably stem cell source. Improved functional recovery post NSPC transplantation was found to be higher in transection and contusion models. Moreover, NSPC transplantation in acute phase of spinal injury was found to have better functional recovery. Higher doses (>3 � 106 cell/kg) were also shown to be optimum for transplantation, but immunosuppressive agent administration negatively affected the motor function recovery. Scaffold use in NSPC transplantation could also effectively raise functional recovery. � 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of IBR

Prevalence of high blood pressure in Iranian adults based on the 2017 ACC/AHA guideline

Background:: In 2017, American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) presented a new guideline for assessing blood pressure in adults. This study aimed to assess the prevalence of hypertension in Iranian adults based on ACC/AHA 2017 guideline. Methods: Data from 9801 Iranian adults (59.2 women) aged between 20-69 years were obtained from the sixth round of National Surveillance of Risk Factors of Non-Communicable Diseases (SuRFNCD) performed in 2011. Blood pressure was classified as normal, elevated blood pressure, and stage 1 and 2 hypertension using a weighted analysis and 2017 ACC/AHA guidelines. Data were presented as prevalence and 95 confidence interval (95 CI). All analyses were performed in Stata/SE 14.0. Results: Overall prevalence of hypertension in Iranian men was 52.0. Also, 32.9 (95 CI: 29.9-36.0) and 19.1 (95 CI: 16.921.6) of men had stage 1 and 2 hypertension, respectively. In addition, 44.3 of women had hypertension, of whom 26.3 (95 CI: 24.5 - 28.2) had stage 1 and 18.0 (95 CI: 16.1-20.1) stage 2 hypertension. Furthermore, 16.5 (95 CI: 14.4-18.9) and 9.6 (95 CI: 7.86-11.7) of men and women had elevated blood pressure, respectively. Conclusion: The findings of this study indicated that adopting the 2017 ACC/AHA guidelines showed a higher prevalence of adult hypertension (48.2) in Iran. In this study, the prevalence of hypertension in men was higher than in women, which was steadily increased by age in older adults in both sexes. © Iran University of Medical Sciences

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Unusual histologic type of medullary carcinoma of thyroid: A case report

In this paper we have reported and discussed an unusual histopathologic feature of medullary carcinoma which is one of the pitfalls in the diagnosis of this tumor. The patient was a 14 years old girl who complained of painless, gradually growing cervical mass from one year ago. She had no history of head and neck radiotherapy of familial history of thyroidal or other endocrine disease. In laboratory investigations a cold thyroid nodule was confirmed and FNA of it was reported as follicular lesion. The patient underwent lobectomy isthmectomy with frozen section wich was reported as Hurthle neoplasm and then the other lobe of patient's thyroid resected. In it's pathologic exam another nodule was observed which mostly composed of spindle cells; at last histochemically medullary carcinoma confirme

Smoking and physical activity in healthy adults: A crosssectional study in Tehran

Background: Smoking and physical inactivity are two major risk factors for non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Not only these factors have a causal effect on NCDs, but they can also affect each other. This study aimed to assess the relationship between these factors as well as their effect on NCDs. Materials and Methods: A total of 2,602 healthy adults aged 30-60 years participated in this survey in 2010. Data on demographic characteristics, medical history, smoking status, physical activity and anthropometric measures including weight and height were collected and analyzed. The effect of smoking on physical activity was evaluated by logistic regression adjusting for potential confounders. Results: Among demographic characteristics, only age (P<0.001) and educational level (P<0.001) had a significant association with smoking status. Compared with nonsmokers, smokers had an odds ratio of 4.88 (95% CI, 3.34-7.13) for having unsatisfactory physical activity. Conclusion: The present study showed that cigarette smoking negatively affects the quality of physical activity

Investigating impact of motor oil quality on vehicles engine induced noise level

Introduction: Vehicle engine id one of the main sources of noise which its level is influenced by various parameters. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of motor oils quality before and after oil change on the variability of vehicle engine induced noise level. In this study it is tried to follow-up the efficacy of motor oil quality on engines sound level. Material and Method: First, engine noise of 94 vehicles were recorded for 30 seconds before and after oil change and all the vehicles technical information including mileage, type of motor oil, and type of vehicle were registered. Following, the recorded noises were calibrated in semi-anechoic chamber and the sound pressure levels were measured with A and C-weighting network and main octav bands, using a sound level meters. The obtained results analyzed using SPSS software version 17. Results: The effects of motor oil quality on different noise levels of engines were determined and a significant reduction in noise level of vehicles engine was observed. Investigation of the relationship between mileage and motor oil quality on various engines sound level manifested that vehicles with mileage ranged 100000-150000 miles had significant reduction in their sound pressure levels in comparison with other vehicles. Conclusion: The results revealed that engine oil is among factors reducing the vehicle engine induced noise level. Moreover, the engine oil type and the vehicle mileage are key variables which determine the impact of engine oil quality on reduction of the sound level of vehicles engine

Smoking and physical activity in healthy adults: A crosssectional study in Tehran

Background: Smoking and physical inactivity are two major risk factors for non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Not only these factors have a causal effect on NCDs, but they can also affect each other. This study aimed to assess the relationship between these factors as well as their effect on NCDs. Materials and Methods: A total of 2,602 healthy adults aged 30-60 years participated in this survey in 2010. Data on demographic characteristics, medical history, smoking status, physical activity and anthropometric measures including weight and height were collected and analyzed. The effect of smoking on physical activity was evaluated by logistic regression adjusting for potential confounders. Results: Among demographic characteristics, only age (P<0.001) and educational level (P<0.001) had a significant association with smoking status. Compared with nonsmokers, smokers had an odds ratio of 4.88 (95% CI, 3.34-7.13) for having unsatisfactory physical activity. Conclusion: The present study showed that cigarette smoking negatively affects the quality of physical activity

Investigating impact of motor oil quality on vehicles engine induced noise level

Introduction: Vehicle engine id one of the main sources of noise which its level is influenced by various parameters. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of motor oils quality before and after oil change on the variability of vehicle engine induced noise level. In this study it is tried to follow-up the efficacy of motor oil quality on engines sound level. .Material and Method: First, engine noise of 94 vehicles were recorded for 30 seconds before and after oil change and all the vehicles technical information including mileage, type of motor oil, and type of vehicle were registered. Following, the recorded noises were calibrated in semi-anechoic chamber and the sound pressure levels were measured with A and C-weighting network and main octav bands, using a sound level meters. The obtained results analyzed using SPSS software version 17. . Results: The effects of motor oil quality on different noise levels of engines were determined and a significant reduction in noise level of vehicles engine was observed. Investigation of the relationship between mileage and motor oil quality on various engines sound level manifested that vehicles with mileage ranged 100000-150000 miles had significant reduction in their sound pressure levels in comparison with other vehicles. .Conclusion: The results revealed that engine oil is among factors reducing the vehicle engine induced noise level. Moreover, the engine oil type and the vehicle mileage are key variables which determine the impact of engine oil quality on reduction of the sound level of vehicles engine